Suchergebnisse

This article proposes a framework for understanding large-scale individualized collective action that is often coordinated through digital media technologies. Social fragmentation and the decline of group loyalties have given rise to an era of personalized politics in which individually expressive personal action frames displace collective action frames in many protest causes. This trend can be spotted in the rise of large-scale, rapidly forming political participation aimed at a variety of targets, ranging from parties and candidates, to corporations, brands, and transnational organizations. The group-based "identity politics" of the "new social movements" that arose after the 1960s still exist, but the recent period has seen more diverse mobilizations in which individuals are mobilized around personal lifestyle values to engage with multiple causes such as economic justice (fair trade, inequality, and development policies), environmental protection, and worker and human rights.

Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response.

This book opens and closes with the puzzle of how Russian rulers can control, distort, and bend the news to their own ends without worrying about how the audience receives it. On its first page, Ellen Mickiewicz asks: "[W]ouldn't these political leaders want anxiously to know what viewers make of the news?" And on its last page (p. 206) we are told that "political leaders and broadcasters persist in imagining an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass on the other side of the screen." While there is no direct evidence in the rest of the book to indicate that leaders do not know what to make of their audience, or that they assume it to be an undifferentiated, unsophisticated mass, these assumptions set up an interesting look at what audiences actually make of television news in Russia.